Servlet 3.0 improves JEE by easing development through annotations, by adding standardized asynchronous processing support, and by improving pluggability and extensability through a modular web.xml. Rémy Maucherat and the JBoss Web team bring Servlet 3 capabilities to the AS through their integration of JBoss Web 3.0.

JPA 2.0 enhances Java persistence with its increased modeling flexibility, greater object-relational mapping capabilities, new locking options and a criteria query API. The Hibernate project brings JPA 2.0 capabilities to the AS through the integration of their 3.5.0-CR-1 release.

RESTEasy is a JBoss project that provides various frameworks to help you build RESTful Web Services and RESTful Java applications. It is a fully certified and portable implementation of the JAX-RS 1.0 specification and will provide the AS’s support for JAX-RS 1.1 by the final AS 6..0.0 release.

You can find the full release notes for the release here, and the official download location is here.

This release continues with the milestone versioning scheme Jason Greene discussed in his AS 6.0.0.M1 announcement. The milestone model focuses on time constrained releases that each provide a small set of completed features. A series of milestone releases will eventually culminate in the final AS 6.0.0 release. This second milestone is the first AS release that was produced via a truly time-boxed approach. I think it’s been quite a successful and enjoyable way to produce a release.

Many thanks to the entire JBoss AS team for their hard work on this release. Special thanks go to Steve Ebersole and the Hibernate team and Rémy Maucherat and the JBoss Web team for providing such a painless integration of the Servlet 3 and JPA 2 features. Thanks also to Jason Greene for giving me the opportunity to drive this release. It’s been a blast!